“Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.” - Albert Camus

One cannot be happy in exile or in oblivion. One cannot always be a stranger. I want to return to my homeland, make all my loved ones happy. I see no further than this.

“To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.” 

Albert Camus

“But all the long speeches, all the interminable days and hours that people had spent talking about my soul, had left me with the impression of a colorless swirling river that was making me dizzy.”

Albert Camus,The Stranger

“Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.”

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

He had been bored, that’s all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!

“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.”

Albert Camus, The Plague

“I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the Last Judgement. It takes place every day.”

Albert Camus, The Fall

Camus and His Women ›

“Every act of rebelling expresses a nostalgia for innocence.”

Albert Camus

“Henry picked up Camus’ “Resistance, Rebellion and Death”… read some pages. Camus talked about anguish and terror and the miserable condition of Man, but he talked about it in such a comfortable and flowery way… his language… that one got the feeling that things neither affected him nor his writing. Camus wrote like a man who had finished a large dinner of steak, french fries, and salad and had topped it off with a bottle of good French wine. Humanity may have been suffering, but not him. A wise man, perhaps, but Henry preferred people whoscreamed when they burned.” 

Charles Bukowski, Scream When You Burn 

“The more I produce, the less I am certain. On the road along which the artist walks, night falls ever more densely. Finally, he dies blind.”

Albert Camus

“We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.”

Albert Camus, The Rebel

“Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, [he] is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

“Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops. Oh, no! It’s a chore, on the contrary, and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.”

Albert Camus, The Fall